Field of Disclosure
This disclosure relates generally to natural language processing and more particularly to inferring time to prepare a food item described in a recipe.
Description of the Related Art
Although recipes are available from many sources (e.g., the Internet), such recipes do not have a standard format and may omit useful information about the recipe such as the total time to prepare a food item described in the recipe. Additionally, some recipes may include inaccurate preparation times because preparation times vary with the skill of the cook. A skilled cook may indicate a total preparation time for a recipe that is much lower than the time an average recipe reader would spend to prepare the food item.
When curating an information source including a large number of recipes, it is infeasible to determine the preparation time of every recipe experimentally. Some food preparation times (e.g., time to cook a turkey in an oven) may be determined mathematically (e.g., a heat transfer analysis of a turkey in an oven). Recipes contain other preparation steps, however, whose time does not follow a mathematical relationship, so it is not practical to estimate a recipe's preparation time a priori. Additionally, the large number of possible combinations of ingredients, cooking techniques, and cooking equipment precludes empirically determining preparation times for each combination. Thus, present techniques are ill-suited for estimating total preparation times for a large number of recipes.